


unscarred

by MousselineSerieuse



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Agni Kai (Avatar), Fire Siblings Week 2020, Gen, Pre-Canon, it's about the IDEOLOGY, violence is more alluded than graphic but warning just to be sure
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-26
Updated: 2020-10-26
Packaged: 2021-03-08 23:14:22
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,493
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27204368
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MousselineSerieuse/pseuds/MousselineSerieuse
Summary: She has never been so far above him as she is now.
Relationships: Azula & Zuko (Avatar)
Comments: 15
Kudos: 57





	unscarred

_You know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must._

-Thucydides, _The History of the Peloponnesian War_

_. . ._

She tells Mai and Ty Lee about it afterward, at school—because of course she goes to school that afternoon. There isn’t any reason not to. It’s Mai’s reaction that interests her especially, but in the event all Mai does is sit there, white-faced and unmoving, with her eyes fixed on some point beyond the rooftops and her hands folded limply in her lap. Like a statue, or like some kind of prey animal, quiet and still and hoping not to be seen.

“You should have been there,” Azula says. She can hear the screaming still. If Mai had been there she probably wouldn’t have been able to stay so _composed._

Mai inclines her head incrementally. “Banished,” she says finally. “Why?”

The tremor in her voice is somehow satisfying. “Oh, I don’t know. For cowardice? For dishonor? For being a complete failure in everything he’s ever done? The possibilities are endless. Don’t you agree, Ty Lee?”

Ty Lee blinks, long and slow, and then she smiles. “Of course!” Ty Lee loves to participate, to be a participant. Above them the sky is cloudless, and the grass on the lawn in front of them is a saturated emerald-green. The entire school is sitting out in the courtyard, eating lunch and pretending they’re not straining to catch every word Azula says. Not that it matters. Not that it’s going to stay a secret.

Neither of them says anything else, Mai or Ty Lee. These are the most talented girls in the entire academy, the smartest and the subtlest and the most skilled. These are her _friends._

“Well,” Azula says—loudly, this time. Announcing it. “If you’re just going to sit there like idiots, I’m going to the training yard.”

She can feel the stares as she makes her way across the grass. She ignores them.

The thing is that she can still _feel_ it, somehow, the smoke and the smell and the heat. The thing is that her heart is beating faster than it should. She takes a deep breath, then another: the air out in the gallery is calm and undisturbed. The thing is that weakness has consequences, and she’s always known this, so it shouldn’t—it _doesn’t—_ come as a surprise.

Azula steps into the center of the empty field and takes up the starting position for the twenty-sixth kata. She gathers up the energy within her, channels it, begins to direct it. _Relax. Concentrate. Focus on the last step out._

After she corrects her angle she will be the youngest firebender in recorded history to have mastered this sequence. And then the next one, and then the next. There can be no more excuses, because Zuko isn’t going to be around anymore to drag her down.

. . .

“I know you have it.”

Azula wonders if anyone has ever told him how _funny_ he looks when he’s frustrated. He stands at the entrance to her room, the door flung open beside him, as if he’s never even heard of knocking.

She gives him her sweetest smile. “Oh, come on, Zuko. What would I want with your knife?”

It isn’t the first time he’s asked her this question. Not that he’s necessarily asking. That stupid knife, the one Uncle sent him from Ba Sing Se all those years ago. It’s even mass-produced.

“I know you have it,” he repeats. His hands clench uselessly at his sides. This is almost a game with him: the calmer she stays, the angrier he gets. There’s a strange sort of power in watching him unravel while she herself remains perfectly, serenely composed.

“Well, I don’t.” She leans back on her elbows. “Is that all?”

“You’re lying.”

(She isn’t, is the thing.)

She tilts her head to the side, and says: “Maybe.”

. . .

The Avatar was a traitor to the nation. Anyone who’s been to school knows that. This is the danger of unrestricted power, of ability without loyalty. The Avatar was reborn into the Air Nation, and the Air Nation drew arms against the Fire Lord, and the Avatar has never been heard from again.

Azula knows all of this. She understands, even if he doesn’t, that Zuko isn’t meant to come back.

. . .

Every week, they end up in the same place. Every week, before the doors open and admit them to the throne room, there’s some secret, shameful part of Azula that wants to run away, to find somewhere dark and quiet and hide there until everyone forgets that she’s supposed to be reporting to her father. It’s an impulse that she should have long since outgrown. To distract herself she watches Zuko glance up at the door and back down, his jaw set, avoiding her gaze, his own nervousness palpable in the pressure of the room.

(Li and Lo always tell each other how good it is of the Fire Lord to take such an interest in his children.)

One afternoon she finds him practicing his katas in the hallway, his feet shuffling against the marble, replicating the flow without the energy. He stops abruptly when he sees her, and his face turns bright red.

“You’re doing it wrong,” she tells him, and before she can elaborate the door opens.

First comes the report on their studies: Zuko’s tutors and Azula’s instructors from the Academy, called every week to the palace for this occasion. Then Li and Lo with points of behavior, discipline, and protocol. And then finally the masters.

Azula goes first. She stands with her hands folded in the correct opening stance while the Sifu details her progress on the twenty-sixth kata. Then she begins. The low kick, the complicated footwork in the middle, all building up to the final, impressive burst of power.

On the last landing she twists her ankle.

She forces her leg not to buckle, digging into her heel and ignoring the throb of pain. Tears spring to her eyes instantly, involuntarily, without any opportunity to correct herself. She can’t do anything but blink them back as she makes her final bow.

She doesn’t limp as she leaves the floor. Her mind is so clouded with pain and with the memory of her mistake that by the time she refocuses Zuko is in the middle of his demonstration. His fire burns less brightly than hers did, but the look on his face is pure determination.

 _Please fall_ , she thinks desperately, almost wildly. _Please, please fall._

When he trips, she feels delivered. Zuko stumbles back to his feet and starts again, but all Azula can process is the thrum of relief that washes over her, drowning out even the twinge in her ankle.

“You give up too easily, Zuko,” says Father when everything is over. “You could have stayed on your feet, if you possessed the discipline that your sister does. It shows poor judgment to demonstrate a skill you haven't mastered.”

(Somewhere, in some deep-buried part of her mind, Azula knows that if they’d done everything perfectly he would have admonished them for their lack of ambition.)

“ _Told you_ ,” she whispers as she leaves. There’s pain in every step, but she walks straight and dignified, the way a princess should.

She’s almost crying again by the time she makes it back to her room.

. . .

Azula wakes up in the middle of the night, her forehead damp with sweat and her voice hoarse from screaming. It’s some time before the familiar bed hangings register in her mind. She doesn’t remember the dream, but she sees the traces of it: the blankets tangled all around her legs. She waits, hardly daring to breathe, but no footsteps disturb the quiet of the night, and no one comes to open her door.

The next night it happens again.

On the third night she remembers flashes of it: the smell of burning flesh, the smoke. She knew what it was even before this, could not avoid knowing. The fourth night, she’s too afraid to sleep.

At school that day the characters blur together on the page, and in training her forms are sloppy. She steals a pot of face paint from a lady-in-waiting’s dresser, to cover up the dark circles under her eyes. It isn’t sustainable.

On the fifth night she realizes that sleeping face-down on her pillow will muffle her screams. The dreams keep happening after that, but no one ever bothers her about them.

. . .

“Is it true?”

This time she’s the one standing in the doorway, unannounced.

Zuko is tearing apart his room, pulling things out of drawers and cabinets and throwing them haphazardly on the floor. He looks over his shoulder, frowning. “Why do you care?”

“I don’t,” she says. “I was just walking by. So it _is_ true.”

The news came to her secondhand. It’s all anyone has been talking about all afternoon: Zuko challenging General Huang in the middle of the war meeting. Zuko fighting an Agni Kai.

Zuko pauses his search. “I’m going to win,” he says, in a voice that’s somehow both definitive and defensive.

Azula stares at him. She can’t imagine standing up to a field commander over an infantry unit. Over nothing. ( _Right in front of their father.)_ And now, to so easily dismiss the consequences—

“General Huang is almost eighty,” Zuko continues. “He isn’t a match for anyone.” He glances up at her. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

Azula blinks. “I’m not,” she says—too quickly, but he doesn’t seem to notice. “General Huang’s fought in a _lot_ of Agni Kais. I’d be careful if I were you, that’s all.”

He looks at her with derision. Azula thinks that if it were her, she would be lying about it—projecting a confidence she didn’t feel—but Zuko is different. Zuko’s never had an impulse he hasn’t acted on. Zuko actually _believes_ it.

“It's just advice. You don’t have to take it.” She glances down at the floor, strewn with crumpled scrolls and unworn school robes. “Good luck finding your knife.”

He scowls at her. She doesn’t wait to hear his response.

. . .

Zuko is moved to an empty wing of the palace, where Azula’s grandfather used to receive diplomats when there were diplomats to be received. Healers pass in and out of the throne room, and servants whisper behind screens and around corners, but otherwise everything continues as normal.

It reminds Azula of when Grandfather died, only instead of white clothes and ritual outpourings of mourning, everyone seems to be doing their best to act as if Zuko never existed.

A princess has to set an example. At school, Azula stays at the top of her class.

She eats lunch on the steps with Mai and Ty Lee, and tells them what she can’t tell anyone else. _The healers said that it might be infected. They said that it’s going to scar. Did you know that no one has even_ reported _seeing the Avatar in eighty-seven years?_

Mai and Ty Lee mostly listen in silence, but sometimes she catches them looking at her with unspoken questions in their eyes. She imagines the things they don’t dare say to her, and lingers on the details. _I heard the scullery maids say that he screams every time they change the bandages._

“Have you seen him?” asks Ty Lee one afternoon. “Since—you know.”

Azula folds her arms. “Of course not,” she says. “He’s been banished. He just hasn’t left yet.”

That afternoon, she goes into his room.

It’s strange to see it so empty and so still. All of the clothes have been cleared out of the cabinets, the bed remade and then left untouched. Azula wraps her hand around one of the bedposts, which stirs up dust. Apparently, no one has even been in to clean.

It’s pure accident that she looks down into the space between the mattress and the frame, and sees something gleaming.

Azula reaches down. Her hand closes around the handle of a knife.

She holds the blade up to the sunlight. It’s cheaply made. Anyone with even a basic knowledge of weaponry can see that. The handle is pearl but improperly joined, and the steel is decidedly not of the highest quality. She turns it over, and reads the inscription on the other side.

_Never give up without a fight._

. . .

Weakness has consequences. Azula _knows_ this. A weak ruler cannot govern his nation. A weak soldier cannot defend his homeland. A weak father cannot guide his children in the direction that they ought to go.

“Your mother never understood you,” her father tells her—not the Fire Lord, hidden behind a veil of smoke, but _her father_ sitting across from her in his private study, their tea growing cold in front of them. Zuko’s Agni Kai is two days from now. “She had an unfortunate sense of pity. She was afraid of you because of your strength—because of the potential you show.”

Azula warms her tea between her hands—he’s watching her do it—and doesn’t drink it. “I know.”

(They don’t talk about Zuko, but Azula knows her father. She knows, because he’s told her before, that some outcomes are too important to be left up to chance.)

. . .

She knows the room by the tea service left outside the door. Not Zuko’s, probably, but Uncle’s. Azula wonders if this means that the kitchen servants were right: that General Iroh _is_ accompanying the prince into exile.

Her father would call this _typical._

Zuko is asleep when she opens the door. He looks—like himself. He’s paler, of course, and half his face is swathed in white gauze, but his expression is almost peaceful, normal. It’s not what she was expecting. She isn’t certain anymore what she was expecting.

She leaves the knife on the table next to the bed, and turns to leave.

“Azula?”

His voice is stiff from sleep and from disuse. And for a moment she panics again—wants to run—

“What?” she asks, her voice laced with innocence.

He sits up as far as he’s able. “What are you doing here?” There’s something in his good eye, anger and confusion and something suspiciously like hope. “Did Dad send you?”

He’s such an _idiot_.

“Of course not,” she says. “You’re already banished. Why would he concern himself with you?”

His eye narrows, all confusion gone. “Isn’t this enough for you?”

For a moment, this gives her pause. Then she smiles. “Nothing is ever enough for me, Zuzu. You told me that yourself.”

“Of course,” he says, and he says it so _surely_ , as if everything has just now clicked into place. “This is great for you, isn’t it? This is what you always wanted. You’re even heir to the throne.”

She hadn’t thought of it. _Heir to the throne._ It’s such an obvious angle, and she hadn’t thought of it.

For a moment, she imagines it: herself, seated beyond a screen of fire. The Dragon Throne. The Mandate of Heaven.

She tries to imagine a life without her father in it, and can’t. She tries to imagine a life without Zuko in it, and—

“Don’t blame me,” she says. “It’s not _my_ fault that you wouldn’t even stand and fight.”

He’s out of bed suddenly. He’s standing in front of her, all determination, even as he has to grip the bedpost for stability.

“I’m coming back,” he says. Azula can see the flush of anger spreading over the unbandaged half of his face. “I’m going to find the Avatar, and then I’m coming back.”

It’s such a simple statement. As if things happened so easily, as if you could achieve something just by _wanting_ it enough. ( _You must know the pain of losing a firstborn son_.)

“Well, I hope you'll forgive me if I don’t hold my breath.”

She thinks that if he weren’t so far out of practice—if he didn’t need the support of the bedframe to stay upright—he would lunge at her.

Instead, he stands there, and seethes. “You’re wrong,” he says. “You—you think you know everything, but you _don’t_ , Azula.”

She doesn’t know where the anger comes from. Maybe it’s the way he’s looking at her: so direct, with such challenge, even though they both know that he can barely even walk. She wants to scream, to set something on fire.

“What I know,” she says, meeting his gaze but keeping her voice light, “is that you’re in here, and I’m not.”

It’s the last thing she says to him for three years.

. . .

There have been Agni Kais before. Azula has been to the more important ones—she remembers, very distantly, her and Lu Ten and Zuko together in the royal box, a lightning strike to the heart, Lu Ten leaning down and whispering to Zuko that it’s _all right_ , that it’s an honorable death.

Now it’s only her and Uncle and some of the more important ministers, all of them avoiding each other’s eyes. And Zuko, out at the end of the arena, standing like someone trying very hard to appear confident, with the ceremonial robe wrapped around him. Whispers drift upward like smoke.

Understanding a situation is the first step to dominating it. Later, she’ll tell herself that she knew everything before it happened.

Far below her, she sees General Huang come in and take a seat.

. . .

The ship leaves very early in the morning, unheralded and without honors. Azula has decided long in advance that she isn’t going to watch him go.

She wakes from an untroubled sleep in the flat gray light of dawn. In half an hour there will be breakfast, and then the Imperial Firebenders, and then school. History, decorum, calligraphy _,_ mathematics. No more distractions.

She’s throwing open the shutters before she’s even conscious of getting up.

From her window she can see the gardens spreading out around her, the palace walls, the gold-tiled roofs marching up to the rim of the Caldera. And then the slope of the volcano, terraced fortifications giving way to the crush of houses that grow smaller and closer together the further down they go, and then the shops, the warehouses, the docks. The highest point of everything, the march of civilization.

The rains have started in the last month. The harbor is full of mist. Far below she can make out the ships skimming across the water: six of them heading out toward the Gates of Azulon, their sails bright red against the fog. They are, all of them, indistinguishable from one another.

She closes the window. That morning, she eats her _juk_ in the warm orange glow of torchlight.

. . .

Years later, she will admit to herself that she did not, in fact, know what was going to happen before it happened. But when the Fire Lord steps out into the arena—when Zuko looks up to face his opponent and his eyes go wide, fragile with shock— _then_ she knows.

In this moment it feels like a theater piece, or like a dream. She’s watching it but she’s not _there_ : it isn’t real, or she isn’t. She is observing from a distance of miles, she is every wild-eyed look and every sharp intake of breath. She is sitting all alone in the royal box, separate, unscarred, unaffected.

Weakness has consequences. This is the truth, and she has known it all her life. She has never been so far above him as she is now.

As her brother’s voice breaks down into screams, the corners of her mouth turn up.

. . .

This time, when the doors open, she’s alone.

“It's been a long time since you have shown me your talents, Azula.”

She lifts her head. Her father’s eyes—the Fire Lord’s eyes—are hidden behind the fires, but she knows that he’s looking at her. There isn’t anywhere else to look.

She can feel the weight of his gaze on her as she demonstrates the twenty-sixth kata.

All of her movements are precise, calculated, exact. She has spent hours preparing for this: making corrections, adjusting the distribution of force. Her fire flows without interruption _._ Her last landing is perfect, sure-footed and deceptively light.

She returns to her bow. She feels, as if for the first time, the warmth of the room: the bright glow of the fires, the smell of smoke and incense. Sweat gathers at the back of her neck. She breathes.

“You’ve improved your form,” comes the voice. There’s a pause—he considers her. “I will tell the masters to set you on a more accelerated pace. I expect great things from you, Azula. I hope that you will prove me right.”

She presses her forehead to the ground, and promises him that she will.

. . .

The next morning, in the training grounds, her fire turns blue.

**Author's Note:**

> Come talk to me about A:tLA [on tumblr](https://fire-flakes.tumblr.com/)


End file.
